


Encroaching Thunder

by AetherAria



Series: Calamitous Intent [2]
Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Alternate Universe - All Games Canon, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Canon as Mythology, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon, Reincarnation, im not going to finish this but here ya go, sometimes you save a dude on a beach and there are Consequences whoops
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:41:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23860960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AetherAria/pseuds/AetherAria
Summary: Gan has been traveling for years, keeping his head down and sticking his nose up at destiny. Sometimes destiny comes in with the tide, though.
Relationships: Ganondorf & King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule
Series: Calamitous Intent [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1091601
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Encroaching Thunder

**Author's Note:**

> hello melting chat friends. it is your fault this unfinished nonsense is getting posted. love you. Title from the song Ouroborus by Family and Friends.

Gan thought that perhaps the southeast coast was his favorite place so far- notwithstanding that he had thought that about nearly every other place he had visited. The dunes on the beach were fascinating and comparatively tiny, and the sand itself felt strange, softer and darker and littered with the detritus of the ocean. He liked the little water snails especially; they were both familiar and foreign, and their shells came in a subtle rainbow of color as he traveled down the coast.

His camel was happy to be on familiar footing again, and loped faster and lighter than she had in months. So fast, in fact, that he almost didn’t see the body in the water. Only almost, thankfully.

He pulled the reigns and his steed skid to a stop, turning as she did and kicking up an arc of sand, and Gan was down on his feet before the creature had stopped moving entirely. He kicked his boots off and then bolted barefoot down the beach, shucking his weapons and his shirt, his coin purse and anything else that might weigh him down as he went, leaving a trail behind him. He tried to keep his eyes on the form in the water, but it kept sinking behind the waves and the sunlight glinting harshly off the water was impeding his vision, so he was forced to try to estimate where he should go based on where he had seen the dark mass in the water last.

The water was warm when he charged in, which was almost more of a shock than it would have been if it was frigid. It was hard to think of pleasant, tropical waters as deadly, but he had learned at a young age that even an oasis can drown.

Gan wasn’t a particularly skilled swimmer, but he knew enough to keep himself moving forward, and he was strong enough that he could move _fast_. It was much harder to keep himself oriented in the water, though, much harder to see over the waves to his goal, but he kept moving himself forward anyway, towards where he thought he had last seen the person. When he thought he had gone far enough that he should have seen them again he paused, treading water and twisting his head back and forth to try to catch another glimpse.

“Where are you?” he called in Hylian. He hadn’t seen the figure well enough or for long enough to tell if they were still conscious, but if they were it would be much easier if they could just tell him where to go-

He heard a moaning noise, not quite an answer, but loud enough that he could at least pick out which general direction it came from and start kicking his way over there.

There was salt in his eyes now- it felt different from swimming in fresh water in a way that was only vaguely noticeable, and somehow that made it even more strange, and he was working muscles that hadn’t seen any strenuous use in quite some time now. He grit his teeth, wiped his eyes with a forearm, swam faster.

He almost barreled full speed into the debris, but he put an arm out in front of himself just in time to push the jagged wooden slats aside. He halted again, twisting in place to look for whoever was out here. The debris around him looked like the scattered bits of some sort of life boat that had only partially served its purpose before succumbing to the elements. Gan remembered the screaming winds and sideways whipping rain he had taken shelter from the night before and thought, _oh_ , and that was precisely when he saw the man again.

Gan could tell it was a man now because he was laid out across a small panel of intact wood face-up, the dark skin of his face visibly burned by the sun wherever it wasn’t protected by his thick beard. He was breathing, but his eyes were almost entirely closed, glassy and vague and they certainly weren’t focusing on Gan as he swam closer and gripped the wood.

He considered trying to speak to the man, but if moaning was all he could answer before, Gan didn’t imagine he would do much better now. Besides, getting him out of the water, out of the sun, seemed like the more pressing concern. He gripped the wood in both hands and started kicking in a half-powered backstroke, with the wood and the man being dragged along above his body.

It took what felt like an hour, a day, but eventually his kicking feet felt the sand beneath them and he could wade and pull the man the last few feet to the shore proper. He left him on the wood, then ran back up to his steed and pulled off a length of rope he had with his supplies. He knotted it in a sort of harness to the wood, then dragged that makeshift stretcher up the beach until they were safely in the shade of a small copse of the flat-leaved trees that lined the coast.

Once the man was in the shade, Gan let himself collapse for a minute or so, kneeling in a patch of dunegrass and letting his limbs burn and scream at him, just panting until his breath came almost normal again. He forced himself to stand before he was entirely ready and went to collect all of his strewn possessions from his tear across the sand, then brought them back to the shade and dumped them in a halfhearted pile, to be dealt with later. He looked out at the water briefly but carefully, just in case there were any other unfortunates adrift, as of yet un-rescued, but saw no one. He wasn’t sure if that boded well or ill, but his body was grateful not to have to rush back out into the water again. He called his camel over with three short whistles and took his waterskin from where it hung on the saddle, then took it to the stranger he had saved.

He leaned over the man (compactly built, dark skin and dark hair, a face that seemed like it would be jovial if he were awake, and- fine clothes. Very fine clothes), and examined his face, even more obviously burned now that he was starting do dry off. He pulled off the the man’s fine jacket, then his shirt, hoping that removing his layers would help to diffuse the heat of his skin. Once he was less overburdened, Gan gently opened the man’s mouth and dribbled some water out of the waterskin and over his cracked lips, slowly, knowing full well how heat and dehydration would punish the body for trying to over-correct too quickly. He slowly poured the water until he saw the man’s throat work to swallow, and then he waited a few moments before he poured a bit more. The man swallowed that, then coughed weakly, and Gan sat back.

“Can you hear me?” he said in Hylian, keeping his voice low and steady. He didn’t want the man to panic.

The man’s eyes blinked blearily and he grunted, then said- _something_ , completely unintelligible through the grinding scratchiness of the throat.

“Hm. Perhaps you should not try to speak just yet,” Gan said gently, and then lifted the water to his lips again. “Try to drink more. Slowly, now.”

The man grumbled something and let Gan pour more water down his throat, eyes slipping back closed in visible relief. Gan made sure to keep it slow, not letting the man drink fast enough to hurt himself, which was easy considering he wasn’t strong enough to properly lift his head to try to drink more.

He let the man drink the entire waterskin over the course of something near an hour, and when it was empty his new friend fell into a vague sort of sleep. Gan checked his pulse (even, if a bit fast) and examined the burns on his face (severe enough to be worrying) then stood again, stretching out his spine, sore from hunching over for so long. He wrote a short note in slow, careful Hylian on a small piece of parchment to the effect of ‘back soon’ and left it beside the man in case he woke up again. Then, he finally pulled his outer layers of clothing back on - he had been fussing over the man long enough to dry off completely by now anyway - and swung himself back up on his camel to ride back the way he came.

He needed more water, first of all, and hopefully on the way back towards the stream he had seen yesterday, he would either find another traveler who he could ask for help or - if he was absurdly lucky - burn remedies or ingredients he could use to put one together himself. He hadn’t exactly been on the lookout for herbs and such he could use to make a burn cream before, so he didn’t know what kind of luck he would have now, but he kept his eyes peeled on every patch of green between the dunes for anything useful.

It took him less time than he expected to come back to the water source he remembered, partially because he had been taking quite the meandering path the past few days, enjoying the scenery at first, and then intermittently stopping to brace against the frequent storms that seemed to pepper the coast. He imagined that it was seasonal, and if he came back here when some months had passed the weather might be entirely favorable. Now, he remembered those storms and thought again that perhaps they had been to blame for, or at least related to, his new friend’s plight on the water. Boats were one of the subjects he had near to no knowledge about, but his instincts still told him that some of the winds the last day or so had been fast and vicious enough to whip up waves that would shatter a smaller boat like the one Gan had seen the remains of around and underneath the man.

He filled his waterskin at the stream and then sucked down a good quarter of it himself (it had been a trying morning, thusfar), and when he leaned back down to top it off a particular patch of green on the far side of the small stream caught his eye. He grinned, and capped his waterskin.

It was Lily of the Desert- or at least, it was something very closely related. He was used to the beautifully medicinal plant having thicker, more triangular leaves coming up in a star sort of pattern, but this little patch looked more like a cluster of tiny green fingers extending from a central point. He picked one and the skin oozed clear where it broke, a very promising sign that this was a variety of the plant he knew well back home. He gently picked eight or nine of the thin fronds and wrapped them in a scrap of fabric, then tucked that into a pouch at his hip, where hopefully he could keep from crushing them before he made it back to the beach.

He wished he had a second container to bring more water back, but he would just have to settle for what he had and try to find another water source closer to the beach on his way back, or over the next day or so. Perhaps another of those monsoons, or whatever the term for those storms was, would come along and he could gather as much water as he desired. If he could shelter the man a little, perhaps the rain would even feel nice for his unfortunate new friend.

His camel was exhausted and probably a bit irritated at him, he mused on the ride back, and he resolved to let the creature rest as much as possible over the next day. Perhaps he could find a treat for her, as well. He frowned, wondering where this sudden streak of hypothetical optimism was stemming from. It didn’t feel particularly justified- but then again, maybe it was reactionary.

It was much easier to keep imagining possibilities of unlikely goodness than to contemplate that he had an injured man who was now his responsibility, and no idea how to treat him beyond the most basic level of care. If he did something wrong, the stakes were very, very high.

A familiar experience. This reminded him of the first time he ever saved a stranger on the road, when his instincts to leap in were followed quickly by a terror of acting and failing, or acting and inadvertently causing harm. Of making things worse. He took a deep breath, like the ones he took when he meditated, and tried to quell his anxieties. He had saved a man. The man was still in some degree of peril. He would do his utmost- and that was all he could do. It was better to try and fail than to let his fears paralyze him. His frown tilted into a grim look of determination, and he urged his camel faster. She could rest when they arrived back.

The man was still unconscious, but he had shifted somewhat, curled in on his side on the sand, just barely off of the wooden slat that had thankfully kept him from drowning a few scant hours ago. Gan’s heart thudded roughly for a moment before he saw his chest moving in slow, even, restful breaths, and then he sighed.

He gave his camel a grateful pat when he dismounted, and she grunted and nipped lightly at his fingers before she sank down to lay in the sand in her own patch of shade. Gan pulled the Lily of the Desert from his pouch and pulled a little metal cup out of his cooking supplies. He peeled the soft but intermittently spiky skin from each individual frond and let the clear, gel-like flesh fall into the cup, then used his thumb to crush it all into something of a paste. He mixed in a few drops of water, just enough to make it easier to spread, and then he moved back over to the stranger.

He pulled the scraps of wood out of the way, and then gently, slowly, he pushed the man onto his back again and started applying the salve to the burns on his face. It was lucky the man had such a ridiculous beard and mustache, Gan thought, pursing his lips. It had certainly saved the greater half of his face from the more severe burning.

As simple as it was, the salve would at least help to keep the burns from hurting quite so much when the man woke properly, and in theory it would mollify some of the damage. Gan wasn’t sure if this particular variety of the plant would work as well as the one he grew up with, and even if it did, he hadn’t seen a burn even close to this bad- the closest that had come to this was when his sister Jasra was pinned on a small mesa for the better part of a particularly sunny desert day when a group of local Lizalfos had gotten into a heated conflict with some Moblins that had wandered in from the southeast mountains. The fighting was too intense for her to get herself down, and the creatures hadn’t let up until after sunset. But even her burns were mitigated somewhat because she had been properly dressed for the desert, and the result was still not quite as bad as what Gan saw now.

Once the salve was fully applied, Gan pulled out the waterskin. He almost didn’t want to try to wake the man to make him drink again. How long had it been since he had been pulled from the water? A few hours, perhaps- but had he even slept for however long he had been out on the water? He hadn’t been secured to the wood, if he had fallen asleep completely out there, he certainly would have slipped off into the waves, and as weak as he had been he would have quickly drowned. The man needed to rest- but only almost as badly as his body needed hydration. However, he didn’t want to just start pouring water down a fully unconscious man’s throat. He had some instinct that doing so might result in pouring water into his airways instead, and the last thing he wanted was for the man to choke. He could go right back to sleep again after, Gan thought.

Gan wasn’t sure how to begin rousing the man without panicking him, though. He had been expecting the process of applying the salve to wake him, honestly, and the fact that he had slept through the entire thing wasn’t a glowing statement for recovery.

A little while longer. He could rest a little while longer, and let the water Gan had already introduced into his system continue to help. He would have to reapply the salve again when the first round dried out anyway. He could wait that long.

The wait was shorter than expected, however, because when Gan started a small cooking fire and began to put together a meal for himself, he heard the man behind him groan quietly, and Gan nearly dropped his ladle into the fire. He managed to catch it, and when he turned the man was squinting up at him through cracked eyes with a strange, pained sort of grin on his face.

“Smells wonderful,” he said in a voice like a pile of cracked shells, brittle and sharp. “Hope you’ve planned to cook for two, or I will be very put out. Also, _what_ in the name of the Goddess is on my face?”

Gan stared for a long moment, then set aside the ladle and crouched by the man. “You shouldn’t try to speak, friend. I can’t say how long you were on the water, but you have suffered for it. Your face is covered in a remedy to help keep your burns from paining you too terribly. Here-” he lifted the waterskin from his hip and pressed it to the man’s lips. “Try to drink a bit more. It will help.”

The man took a long, slow pull, then broke aside to cough into his hand.

“Easy,” Gan said, resisting an urge to pat the stranger on the shoulder. “Slowly, and it will go down easier.” He paused, then raised an eyebrow as the man started drinking again. “I don’t think you’ll be able to share my meals for a little while yet, unless you should like me to grind them into a paste for you first.”

The man choked on a sip and scowled up at Gan. “Cruel, sir, to make me laugh like that.”

“I apologize,” Gan said earnestly, though he knew the stranger was at least partially kidding.

The man took another long pull, and managed not to cough when he was finished this time. “Thank you,” he said, sounding incrementally less ravaged. “Where am I?”

Gan put the waterskin aside and sank from his crouch to sit on the sand beside the man. “Hm. I have been traveling, and this land is still strange to me, so I cannot answer with certainty. We are somewhere along the coast of Faron, if we have not passed into what counts as Necluda yet. I was planning to visit the city of fishers further along, but I cannot say how close we are.”

The man’s face took on a pall of worry. “I am… quite far from where I started.”

“I found you among some small bits of debris- were you in so small a ship as that?”

“No, no- I was on a traveling vessel in the Faron sea, near the mouth of the river Menoat. There had been a storm, and we were just putting the ship back together when another hit, more quickly than we could have predicted. Many of us were on smaller vessels, recovering what had been swept off the deck and assessing the damage to the hull, and I had- I was on one of the recovery boats when it hit, with- with my friend.”

Gan let the man speak, but he had the distinct and troubling impression that the words were being edited slightly before the man was saying them. He decided to ignore that for now- perhaps he simply wasn’t trusted enough yet to hear the fullest version of the story. “Your friend?” he asked, voice carefully uninflected in case this was a point of grief.

The man shook his head. “I cannot say. The boat tipped nearly over and the rope connecting us to the ship had snapped, and when it righted itself I was in the water, but had kept a hand on the side and kept myself tethered. My friend had not managed that. But- that was still when we were close to the larger vessel, so perhaps she was secretly much luckier than I was. Perhaps they scooped her up.”

“But not yourself?”

He sighed. “The waves were high, and the rain was dense and opaque, I lost sight of the boat very quickly after that, though I admit that was in no small part because I was looking into the water more than I was trying to get back. By the time I realized I had lost sight of the ship as well as my friend, the storm had worsened, and my little vessel couldn’t quite take the strain.”

“And that’s how it broke apart?”

“No, no. That happened in the third storm. If I were less stubborn, I should have let myself sink after that, but alas, I kept clinging to what remained.”

Gan huffed an uncomfortable, incredulous breath. “Some deity is unhappy with you, my friend.”

He rubbed the back of his neck and said in a low wry voice, “I’m beginning to think much the same, yes.”

Gan held out the waterskin again and the man managed to lift a hand and take it from him, and he took a long, grateful sip.

“Ah,” Gan said suddenly. “Our meeting has taken such strange shape that we have skipped a rather important step, my friend.” He held out a hand in the manner of Hylians and said, “I am called Gan, formerly of Gerudo Desert.”

“Rhoam,” he returned, and shook Gan’s hand warmly. “I am Rhoam. Thank you for your greeting and your- hospitality,” he concluded with a laugh that only just managed not to turn into a cough.

“These may not be _my_ sands,” Gan said, feigning graveness, “but I shall treat any guests on them as if they were.”

“I am grateful,” Rhoam said, and took another long sip. Gan was glad the man was awake, but it would mean that he would need to leave to replenish their water much sooner. At least this time he wouldn’t need to worry about leaving an unconscious Rhoam alone and unguarded on the beach. “And- you found no one else?”

Gan read the shade of worry in Rhoam’s eyes and he felt a tug of sympathy for him. “No. No other people, and no debris aside from your small boat. If anyone else was separated from your vessel, they did not drift as far as you did.”

“I hope that bodes well for them,” he said gently.

“As do I,” Gan agreed. He could have said that he was certain that it did, or that he was sure Rhoam’s company had all made it back to his ship safely, but empty platitudes would help nothing. Better to be honest. “Where do you think your vessel would go next?”

“They may not have given up searching, yet,” Rhoam murmured, dragging a hand down his face and roughly through his beard.

Gan blinked. “Quite a level of commitment for a crewmate,” he said, approvingly. Rhoam- winced, which was strange, and then gave an agreeable smile. “Where would they go after they failed to find you?”

He frowned, stared at the fire for a moment. “We were going to come around the south coast and travel all the way north to Akkala, eventually, but we had been planning to put in to port in Lurelin. That is the city of fishers you had mentioned, I believe?”

Gan nodded, though he hadn’t heard that name before. This man was Hylian, so he would know better than Gan would about the local landscape. “That was my next destination, so far as I had one. I can accompany you there and see you back to your ship, if you desire company.”

Rhoam sighed and patted his palm off of one thigh. “Currently I desire legs that don’t feel as if they will crumple beneath me if I stand. A friend to walk with me would be more than I could expect.”

“I will exceed even that, then,” Gan said, smile tilting into a grin.

“How so?”

“I will walk _for_ you,” he said magnanimously, and then he slipped back towards earnest again. “Or, my steed will. She shall carry you, so long as you are still weakened.”

Rhoam laughed, eyes brightening. “Your steed, my friend?”

Gan gave a short burst of whistles, and his camel loped over from where she had wandered to nibble on some grass up by the tree line.

Rhoam’s face took on an expression that would have been a gawp on someone with less of a refined face. “A magnificent creature, to be sure,” he said softly, as if afraid of spooking her. Gan chuckled, and the camel seemed unaware of any sort of awe owed her as she nibbled on Gan’s shirt at the shoulder, her way of demanding treats. He ignored that, and just patted at the side of her snout.

“If you say so,” Gan said. “Though, you will likely not be ready to ride for a day or so. Even riding will take its toll on the body, and you would do well to take things slowly at first. It would not do to damage you any further than the sun and the sea already have.”

“You are right,” Rhoam said, resigned. “Though it pains me to say. I am eager to rejoin my fellows, or at least to- to discover their fates.”

“Don’t go digging for darkness,” Gan said, voice casual. “If you do, you shall surely find it.”

Rhoam smiled unexpectedly. “Wise words.”

They went quiet for a while after that, while Gan remembered and then quickly ate his meal. He pulled a coconut from his pack and tapped a hole in it, poured the milk out into another metal cup from his cooking supplies and handed it to Rhoam. “Not much, but it will be good to put something a bit more than water into your stomach, even if your throat is too raw for proper food.”

“Thank you,” Rhoam said, and after a pause in which he visibly restrained himself, he slowly, sip by sip, drank it down.

The evening was mostly companionable after that, despite the rather awkward need to reapply the Lily of the Desert salve. Rhoam’s hands were still shaky, his arms weak from literally clinging to life, and Gan wasn’t going to let the man burn just because it was much more strange to smear the clear gel onto his face when was awake and aware and able to comment on the process.

He kept _laughing_ , silent but still shaking his shoulders with it, and Gan stopped to frown every time he did.

“You aren’t making this particularly easy on me,” Gan said eventually, some measure of his frustration tempered by his own amusement.

“It’s not often that I have a stranger-gone-savior with his hands on my face the first day we meet,” Rhoam said with a snort. “For that matter, it’s not often that I have anyone touching my face. Even my daughter is too short to reach most of the time.”

“Daughter?” Gan asked, pausing to tilt his head.

“Aye,” Rhoam said. “Just the one, and no more likely to come.”

Gan was mildly surprised by that. Rhoam did strike him as a parent, but something about him made Gan think he would be the type to have a brood, a gaggle, a little army of children all his own. That could be a sensitive topic, though, Gan intuited, and he didn’t ask about it. Instead, he asked, “Was she on your ship with you?”

“Goodness no, she’s too young for that kind of voyage.” Gan wondered briefly exactly what kind of voyage it had been, but brushed the thought aside. If Rhoam wanted to provide details, he would. “She’s back at- back home in the kingdom proper.”

“Hyrule?” Gan asked. “In the valley, below the castle?”

“Hyrule,” Rhoam agreed, looking wistful. “I haven’t been away from home for very long yet, but I began to miss it the very moment that I left. I love seeing new places,” he said, and then nudged Gan slightly, “meeting new people, all of that. But I still feel as if I am missing something important by being out here instead of there with her.”

“Why be here, then?”

“There was this storm, you see,” Rhoam began with a grin, and Gan tried to hide his own smile.

“I believe you know what I meant,” he chided, and Rhoam nodded agreeably.

“I do, yes.” He sighed, and looked out at the ocean with his smile fading. “I have little choice in the matter.”

Gan considered that. There were a few different things Rhoam could be implying, but Gan wasn’t overly fond of making assumptions, so he chose to take the words at face value. “How soon will you be returning to her, after you and your ship are reunited?”

“Not for months, at least. Longer now, with this delay. And it could be delayed longer still, depending on-” he hesitated, but when he opened his mouth to amend his words as he had done a few times now, he met Gan’s eyes, and Gan watched the moment when Rhoam realized that Gan had been noticing his self-editing, and had not said anything about it. His mouth clamped shut for a moment, jaw tensing, and then he relaxed. “I apologize,” he said earnestly.

“There is no need.” Gan shook his head. “I am not entitled to your life and secrets simply due to the manner in which we met. I demand nothing of you, and I never will.”

“A bold claim for anyone to make,” Rhoam said with amusement. “But- I am somewhat unsurprised. You do not have the air of someone who demands.”

Gan smiled at that, genuinely pleased. “If there are things you cannot or will not tell me, I am not bothered by that. If it is a matter of ‘yet’, I can accept that as well, but I do not do any of this with the expectation of eventual change.”

“You are not like others, are you Gan?”

Gan blinked. “I believe my position is a common one among my people,” he said gently. “It is bad manners to pry into the business of passing travelers in the desert, and bad luck besides.”

“Bad luck?”

“Quite,” Gan confirmed. “Though I do not put much stock into the idea of luck, myself. My mother does, however, and certain of my sisters, so I’ve grown into the habit of minding it anyway.” He shifted on the sand and lifted his hand again. “Now. Will you let me make an attempt to save your poor skin, or have you not giggled yourself out just yet?”

"I do not _giggle_ ,” Rhoam said indignantly, and Gan responded with a vague humming noise to indicate his doubt. Rhoam huffed, but he closed his eyes and leaned forward obligingly. His jaw clenched when Gan began to apply the salve again, but his expression relaxed quickly after that. After a moment or so of quiet, Rhoam cleared his throat. “Actually,” he rumbled, carefully not moving his face more than necessary, “that feels quite nice. Thank you.”

Gan- felt his cheeks heat, glad that Rhoam’s eyes were still closed. “No need for thanks,” he said mildly, fingers still moving as he brushed gently over the last patch of damaged skin. “There. That should be all, until it dries out or starts to hurt again.”

“Thank you,” Rhoam said again as he blinked his eyes back open, and Gan just smiled and shook his head.

* * *

That night, Gan had one of the dreams. It happened less frequently now that he was grown, and it had been a few weeks since the last one. A deluge of scattered memories, those from a lifetime somewhat familiar to him by now, the one where he met the princess young, and his victory came early and underwhelming. Where he had ruled Hyrule for unsatisfying _years_ before the boy had scooped his past out from beneath him. He raged against his victories erased regardless, his difficult work undone, and when he woke in the dark with salt touched sea air on his cheeks and brilliant stars flitting between darkly invisible palm fronds above him, his first coherent thought was _why now_?

He tilted his head back against his pack - serving currently as a pillow - to check if he had woken Rhoam with any unconscious noises or thrashing, but he appeared deeply enough asleep that Gan felt almost jealous of him for it.

If he had been on his own, he would have most likely given up on sleep for the evening, perhaps even gathered his belongings and broken camp in the dead of night, but obviously that was not an option at the moment. He couldn’t even in good conscience let himself stay awake until dawn to avoid returning to the nightmare, not if he wanted to be a useful companion tomorrow.

He rearranged himself on the sand, stretching his toes and laying his arms down at his sides, and then he exhaled, slow and even out through his mouth, until he felt as if his lungs were empty. Then, he inhaled, just as slowly and deeply, and tried to clear his mind.

Gan had never become particularly _good_ at meditation, at least if what his parents had tried to teach him was accurate, but like with most things in his life, he refused to let a little thing like lack of natural ability stop him. His stubbornness was always best applied to himself.

He pushed away thought. Pushed away worry about why saving a stranger would summon the dreams again (had his past self done something similar?), pushed away concern about having enough food for both of them until they got to Lurelin, pushed away the giddiness that came with having another person around again, with having company, and especially company that seemed already to understand his sense of humor and his own quiet sort of communication-

He was getting ahead of himself. He stopped pushing. Let the thoughts come, and then pass back away, and in between he focused on sensation that summoned no further thought. The sand under his palms. The wind rustling his hair. The noise of the waves, not too distant but not too rushing loud. He matched his breathing pace to the sound of the water coming in, going out.

His mind cleared of all but that rhythm, and then of everything entirely.


End file.
